The 'fear of missing out' (FOMO) phenomenon – a feeling that friends and connections are leading more interesting lives – is having a negative impact on the psychological wellbeing of social media users, a new study suggests.

Providing physically inactive adults access to online social networking about walking as well as personalized feedback did not add more benefit than just providing emailed tips, according to Penn State College of Medicine ...

Public health researchers have long used social networks to understand the spread of infectious diseases, but those social networks often have gaps. A team of researchers recently showed that spatial analysis can help fill ...

A study published recently examined the effects of video games on maths, reading and science skills and makes some interesting claims about the positive influence of the teenage participants' online gaming habits.

Over a 1-year period, academic cardiovascular physicians at the Mayo Clinic used a new Twitter account to share medical news and gained more than 1,200 followers, with tweets of original journal content garnering the greatest ...

A new report in Biological Psychiatry reports that brain alterations in infants at risk for autism may be widespread and affect multiple systems, in contrast to the widely held assumption of impairment specifically in social ...

A powerful new technology that maps the "social network" of proteins in breast cancer cells is providing detailed understanding of the disease at a molecular level and could eventually lead to new treatments, Australian scientists ...

Social network service

A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people.

While it could be said that email and websites have most of the essential elements of social network services, the idea of proprietary encapsulated services has gained popular uptake recently.

The main types of social networking services are those which contain category divisions (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with Facebook widely used worldwide; MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn being the most widely used in North America; Nexopia (mostly in Canada); Bebo, Hi5, StudiVZ (mostly in Germany), Decayenne, Tagged, XING;, Badoo and Skyrock in parts of Europe; Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America; and Friendster, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch, Xiaonei and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands.

There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAF standard and the Open Source Initiative), but this has led to some concerns about privacy.